Expert: Stratification Undermines American Higher Education’s Capacity for Enabling Social Mobility

Expert: Stratification Undermines American Higher Education’s Capacity for Enabling Social Mobility: Although a college education has increasingly become the sole path into the shrunken middle class, social stratification within the world of higher education threatens to undermine the American Dream.

That was one of the major points that economist Anthony Carnevale made during a presentation Monday at the annual at the 2012 NCCEP/GEAR UP Conference.

“Our post-secondary system has become highly segregated by class, by race and by ethnicity,” Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, said during a workshop titled, “The Growing Importance of Higher Education, Attaining Middle Class Earnings, and the Increasing Stratification of Access.”

“It is more and more the case that the four-year college system is whiter and more affluent, [while] the two-year system is browner and blacker and more working class and some poor,” Carnevale said, noting that, for the most part, four-year degrees trump two-year degrees in terms of the salaries they command.